What book shall we discuss next?

[evanovitch]

suggestion for next book

u know, i would love to redo a book we did in school way back an see if we view it tru diffrant eyes,now that we have experienced 1st world living...u know wat mi mean...rereading say Macbeth or such ,years on....would u appreciative it as play as opposed to a dratted book to be swotted ovah fi exam

and

anyone ever read Roslyn Carrington

[evanovitch]

Re: suggestion for next book



A Thirst for Rain
by Roslyn Carrington
(Kensington, $22.00, PG-13) ISBN 1-757566-446-1

Trinidadian Roslyn Carrington joins the ranks of contemporary Caribbean fiction writers with her first Kensington novel, A Thirst for Rain. Carrington also writes under the pseudonym Simona Taylor. TRR has reviewed Night Heat, her first Simona Taylor romance, published by Arabesque/BET Books.
A Thirst for Rain takes place in the foothills of author's native Trinidad. It is the story of Myra Cole who lives on the outskirts of town with Odile, her suddenly moody teenage daughter, and Sebastian, her senile father. Myra makes her living selling Caribbean delicacies: linseed, seamoss and peanut punches, barley soup, hot accra and float, corn soup, peppery black pudding and homemade fruit juices and candies.

Most of the action takes place between April and July. The island is experiencing extreme drought. Revitalizing rain is in short supply. Myra and the residents of the hillside neighborhood in which she lives are in need of replenishment of a different sort.

Myra is pregnant as a result of her three-year on-again, off-again relationship with Slim, trifling street vendor. Younger than Myra, Slim "was not a man for idle conversation and other such post-coital niceties." She agonizes about telling him of her pregnancy...the next time he happens by. In a crowded house full of people, Myra is alone and lonely.

Myra's saving grace is Odile, her "serious, studious child" who attends an all-girls' school in Port of Spain. Odile is scheduled is preparing to take her Advance Level exams in a year, the first step toward university admission and a better life. But Odile, too, is pregnant and agonizes about how to tell her mother.

Jacob is a 48-year-old former champion stickfighter. His glory days behind him, he lives in an ethereal room with yellowing pages of a Bible was wallpaper. He makes his living as a leather smith in the communal yard he shares with the Coles and several other families. He has an excellent vantage point to watch the lives of his neighbors. And, although he is drawn to Myra and her family, he is content to watch from afar.

A Thirst for Rain head and shoulders above Night Heat, her Arabesque romance. The book is organized by month -- from April to July. The tales of the characters are set in chapters that tell their own stories and episodes of their interaction with the other characters. The book is lyrical and her use of language is economical, yet powerful. If the book has a weakness, it is the author's hesitancy to use the rich patois of her characters.

Caribbean writers of the post-colonial era have come of age and are writing stories that are different from the first and early-second generation authors. Their work is altogether different in style and orientation than the works of Claude McKay, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Derek Walcott and Maryse Conde we have become accustomed to.

With A Thirst for Rain, Rosalyn Carrington is carving out her own niche. A Thirst for Rain has earned her a spot on my Emerging Authors List.


--Gwendolyn Osborne


the next one was Every Bitter Thing Sweet

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

well, i am struggling mightily with Small Island. might have to do a speedread to get through it. [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70361-embarassed.gif[/img]

[evanovitch]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
well, i am struggling mightily with Small Island. might have to do a speedread to get through it. [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70361-embarassed.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

why...wat u having a problem wid..the changing voice...look for the continuing link ..it helps....

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
well, i am struggling mightily with Small Island. might have to do a speedread to get through it. [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70361-embarassed.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

why...wat u having a problem wid..the changing voice...look for the continuing link ..it helps....

[/ QUOTE ]
well, mi no really waan start di discussion, but my main problem right now is that i'm finding the voices inauthentic. i don't believe a single character i've met so far, and mi juss done chapter 10. anyway, i'll press on.

[evanovitch]

Re: suggestion for next book

u allowing self to enter an evaluate...stand bak ...dem characters are alll about Ja...or they were

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

i'm trying, i'm trying, lol!

let's recap suggestions for the next book, for February:

Banjo by Claude McKay

The View from Coyoba [Historical Fiction, 1985]

This Island Now [Novel, 1966]

A Wreath for Udomo [Novel, 1956]

Tell Freedom [Autobiography, 1954]

Wild Conquest [Novel, 1950]

Mine Boy [Novel, 1946]

Song of the City [Novel, 1945]

A Thirst for Rain by Roslyn Carrington

French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Giuliano

[ILP]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Giuliano

[/ QUOTE ]

[img]/forums/images/graemlins/70409-waytogo.gif[/img]

[Nunya]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]

well, mi no really waan start di discussion, but my main problem right now is that i'm finding the voices inauthentic. i don't believe a single character i've met so far, and mi juss done chapter 10. anyway, i'll press on.

[/ QUOTE ]

Mi nuh waa stawt de discussion yet needa (aldoa eva seem bent an boun fi stawt it early [img]/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]) becaw mi no read de book yet. But I find it interesting dat yuh say yuh find the voices 'inauthentic'...

About a week back on 'Literature Alive' they featured the literary festival that Colin Channer started up in Ja. Andrea Levy was a reader. She said that she'd only been to Ja twice (including the occasion of the reading) and dat she was asking the audience's forgiveness in advance if her accents and wordings were wrong as she read from 'Small Island'.

Is this what you meant by 'inauthentic'?

Mi waa fimi copy!!!! [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70394-bawlout.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70394-bawlout.gif[/img]

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

i think we could also consider the classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and/or How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in honour of Black History Month.

or, in honour of Magic [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70365-flirt.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70365-flirt.gif[/img], one of our stalwart book clubbers, we could do a book by the Polish journalist and memoirist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I have most of his books, and recommend:

The Emperor, an account of the last days of Haile Selassie

The Soccer War, a diary of his days covering war and turmoil around the world, including a gripping account of being thrown in jail in the Congo in the chaotic days after the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
About a week back on 'Literature Alive' they featured the literary festival that Colin Channer started up in Ja. Andrea Levy was a reader. She said that she'd only been to Ja twice (including the occasion of the reading) and dat she was asking the audience's forgiveness in advance if her accents and wordings were wrong as she read from 'Small Island'.

Is this what you meant by 'inauthentic'?

[/ QUOTE ]
that's part of it. there's this rather stilted way of talking that sounds nothing like the Jamaicans I know, even the one them weh supposedly no speak patwa. and the writer sketches rather than develops her characters, so all these things are happening to them and there's no connection to them, it seems rather mechanical, no emotional connection so far.

mi have more fi seh, but mek mi stop here till di discussion start.

[Gen]

Re: suggestion for next book

so many books so little time [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70365-flirt.gif[/img]

if a see gilbert now I wouldan gie him a bax [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70456-eyebrows.gif[/img]

[evanovitch]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
About a week back on 'Literature Alive' they featured the literary festival that Colin Channer started up in Ja. Andrea Levy was a reader. She said that she'd only been to Ja twice (including the occasion of the reading) and dat she was asking the audience's forgiveness in advance if her accents and wordings were wrong as she read from 'Small Island'.

Is this what you meant by 'inauthentic'?

[/ QUOTE ]
that's part of it. there's this rather stilted way of talking that sounds nothing like the Jamaicans I know, even the one them weh supposedly no speak patwa. and the writer sketches rather than develops her characters, so all these things are happening to them and there's no connection to them, it seems rather mechanical, no emotional connection so far.

mi have more fi seh, but mek mi stop here till di discussion start.

[/ QUOTE ]

but dont u see...that is the intent...the stilted parroting that is done thinking it is being proper...

[mountaingal]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
About a week back on 'Literature Alive' they featured the literary festival that Colin Channer started up in Ja. Andrea Levy was a reader. She said that she'd only been to Ja twice (including the occasion of the reading) and dat she was asking the audience's forgiveness in advance if her accents and wordings were wrong as she read from 'Small Island'.

Is this what you meant by 'inauthentic'?

[/ QUOTE ]
that's part of it. there's this rather stilted way of talking that sounds nothing like the Jamaicans I know, even the one them weh supposedly no speak patwa. and the writer sketches rather than develops her characters, so all these things are happening to them and there's no connection to them, it seems rather mechanical, no emotional connection so far.

mi have more fi seh, but mek mi stop here till di discussion start.

[/ QUOTE ]

but dont u see...that is the intent...the stilted parroting that is done thinking it is being proper...

[/ QUOTE ]
yeah, i got the conceit, but who was being parroted? the english teachers? the evangelical teachers? is that how really those folks talked? it sounds like book talk, but i don't know that the character was a great reader to have adopted that way of talking... there's too much missing to explain why the character talks that way - the Hortense character i mean. and i got a bit confused if the flashbacks are being written in a contemporary voice or a voice from the future. if Hortense is remembering her youth from the perspective of her years spent in England, then whatever corrections to her impressions about what English people were really like and the way they talked would have influenced how she described her youth, no? also, i don't know why she would talk that stilted way with her husband, even if he's a stranger to her - why would she need to prove anything to him? and that whole story about Michael and the wife of the evangelist... i cannot buy it. it sounds like the plot and dialogue for a b-movie, instead of rural jamaica...

[evanovitch]

Re: suggestion for next book

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
About a week back on 'Literature Alive' they featured the literary festival that Colin Channer started up in Ja. Andrea Levy was a reader. She said that she'd only been to Ja twice (including the occasion of the reading) and dat she was asking the audience's forgiveness in advance if her accents and wordings were wrong as she read from 'Small Island'.

Is this what you meant by 'inauthentic'?

[/ QUOTE ]
that's part of it. there's this rather stilted way of talking that sounds nothing like the Jamaicans I know, even the one them weh supposedly no speak patwa. and the writer sketches rather than develops her characters, so all these things are happening to them and there's no connection to them, it seems rather mechanical, no emotional connection so far.

mi have more fi seh, but mek mi stop here till di discussion start.

[/ QUOTE ]

but dont u see...that is the intent...the stilted parroting that is done thinking it is being proper...

[/ QUOTE ]
yeah, i got the conceit, but who was being parroted? the english teachers? the evangelical teachers? is that how really those folks talked? it sounds like book talk, but i don't know that the character was a great reader to have adopted that way of talking... there's too much missing to explain why the character talks that way - the Hortense character i mean. and i got a bit confused if the flashbacks are being written in a contemporary voice or a voice from the future. if Hortense is remembering her youth from the perspective of her years spent in England, then whatever corrections to her impressions about what English people were really like and the way they talked would have influenced how she described her youth, no? also, i don't know why she would talk that stilted way with her husband, even if he's a stranger to her - why would she need to prove anything to him? and that whole story about Michael and the wife of the evangelist... i cannot buy it. it sounds like the plot and dialogue for a b-movie, instead of rural jamaica...

[/ QUOTE ]

she is stilted wid everybody because everything else, she is proper...she has education..she went to college, albeit a questionable version of wat higher education is all about....so dere is a modicum of behaviour she has to exhibit, will exhibit...to show dat despite the sameness of skin hue,she has reason to stand out back home an should be at home in England...because everyone in England is depicted in all the books and the personal examples she has seen ....that is why the shock of the reality of England and her eventual metamorphosis r so striking ...